Apple’s iPhone units could grow by 28% on a year-over-year basis this quarter, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty.

Huberty’s “Alphawise Smartphone Tracker” suggests Apple sells 34.5 million phones in the September quarter. The Street consensus for iPhone sales is in the low thirty millions.

A 28% increase over a year ago would be good considering Apple will only be selling new iPhones for about a week in the quarter. It’s also good considering Apple’s growth was at single digit levels earlier in the year.

Apple’s will never post insane 80%+ growth for the iPhone again. The market is mature, and Apple already sells a lot of phones making mega-growth nearly impossible.

But 28% is a solid, growing number, if accurate.

Morgan Stanley’s Alphawise tracker uses web search analysis and Google Trends to make a forecast. It sounds a little goofy, but last quarter Alphawise predicted 31.3 million units. Apple sold 31.2 million.

While this is good news for Apple, there’s more to the story.

Alphawise predicts a relatively massive quarter for Samsung. It’s expected to sell 47 million Galaxy phones, which would blow Apple out of the water.

Here’s a chart from Huberty that compares Alphawise estimates to actual results”

Fresh reports on the state of the cellphone market during Q2 2013 have blown through the barn door, and industry analysts are flaunting some fairly impressive figures. Smartphones have outsold their less-intelligent brethren for the second quarter in a row, and Strategy Analytics says shipments hit a record-breaking 237.9 million. According to IDC, Samsung managed to ship a total of 72.4 million smartphones during Q2 — a 43.9% boost year-over-year — with help of the Galaxy S 4 and price cuts to the GS3. To put that in perspective, that’s more than double the 31.2 million iPhones Apple managed to ship, and Strategy Analytics claims this marks a three-year low in Cook and Co.’s marketshare. While LG and ZTE each occupy third and fifth place, respectively, Lenovo pushed Huawei out of the number four slot by sending out 11.3 million handsets. If you’re craving for more stats, hit the break for a trio of press releases.

Android on a point-and-shoot? Last year we learned that it could be done. But with some features that duplicate the functionality of a smartphone without an ability to make calls, Samsung’s Galaxy Camera was a confusing mix of form and function. It was very much a first-generation device, and while they may have regretted it later, some curious early adopters did drop $500 for the soon-to-be-obsolete hybrid. The cumbersome compact, with its massive 21x lens and power-hungry 4.8-inch touchscreen, may not have won over the photography community, but Samsung’s 2013 approach has a much better chance at success.

With a design that’s based on the Galaxy S4 Mini, the Galaxy S4 Zoom adds a fair amount of heft to accommodate the feature that sets it apart from every other smartphone on the market: a 10x 24-240mm optically stabilized lens. But it’s still pocketable, believe it or not, and it functions quite well as a phone. While the Galaxy Camera was first and foremost a camera, the Zoom’s primary function is as an ordinary Android smartphone — albeit one with a larger sensor and a powerful lens. Can it replace both devices? And will you want it to? Shoot past the break for our take.

iPads Account For More Than 80 Percent Of Tablet Use (Chitika)The iPad family accounted for 81% of tablet use in the U.S. and Canada during April, up slightly from a few months ago. Kindle Fires accounted for the second largest share, followed by Samsung Galaxy tablets.In other words, even though Androidtook its first lead in global tablet market share last quarter (see chart, right), that’s not showing up in North American usage patterns. It’s likely that Android tablets are filling out the low-end of the tablet market in the emerging world. Read >

Google’s big shake-up of Android version metrics has already given us a better understanding of where the platform’s active users truly stand. Now that we’re a month into the new methodology, we have a good sense of where those users are going — and they’re moving to Jelly Bean in droves. Android 4.1 and 4.2 combined grew to represent 28.4 percent of regular usage, or enough to finally overtake Ice Cream Sandwich at 27.5 percent. Not surprisingly, the transition to the newer OS involved a balanced mix of users either upgrading from ICS (down by 1.8 percent) or transitioning from devices running Gingerbread or earlier (down 1.7 percent). It will be a long while before Jelly Bean becomes the dominant platform, if it ever does, but we’re not expecting a slowdown in adoption when flagships like the Galaxy S 4 and One are luring many of us into an upgrade.

The iPhone had 5X as many tweets as the S4 had on each phone’s launch day. Therefore, Munster believes, “that the standard iPhone will essentially maintain its market share in the high-end of the market through CY13 (low 40% worldwide).”

Heading into the S4 launch there was a lot of buzz that Samsung was catching up to Apple in cool-factor, and popularity. If you believe the results of this Twitter survey, it looks like Samsung still has a ways to go.

There’s one caveat: 73 percent of the iPhone 5 tweets were positive compared to 81% being positive for the S4. Munster thinks this was because, “the iPhone 5 was well telegraphed, thus some consumers may have been let down that there were no surprises.”

Overall, Munster says people should buy Apple shares because it’s going to announce a lot of stuff later this year which will get investors excited.

There are some caveats on this one which we’ll get to, but Apple had a really good holiday quarter compared to its rivals.

comScorereports Apple had 37.8 percent of the U.S. smartphone market for the three months ending in January. Samsung, meanwhile, had 21.4 percent of the market. Apple’s market share was up 3.5 percent compared to the three months ending in October. Samsung was up 1.9 percent.

As for the iOS versus Android market share battle, Apple was 37.8 percent versus 52.3 percent for Android. Apple was up 3.5 percent, while Android was actually down 1.5 percent.

This is good news for Apple, but as we said there are caveats:

Apple does very well in the U.S. It does not do as well elsewhere in the world.

The holiday period was when Apple really launched the iPhone 5. Samsung, meanwhile, was selling the Galaxy S III, an older smartphone model. It only makes sense for Apple to! experie nce a bump in this period.

We’ll see how Apple holds up over the next three to six months as the hype of the iPhone 5 dies off and the hype for the Galaxy S IV cranks into gear.

All that said, considering the Samsung buzz, you would have thought it was killing Apple. These numbers show that Apple can still hold its own.

Canalys is still staking its market share estimates on the view that mobile tablets are as relevant to PC market share as desktops and laptops. If we accept that interpretation, Apple was easily on top of the heap during the fourth quarter. Combining iPads and Macs would give it 27 million computer shipments in the fall, or 20.1 percent of the 134 million computers that left factories — the first time it would have had more than a fifth of the market. Not that Apple was the only one having a good time, however. HP reportedly took back second place from Lenovo by shipping 15 million PCs and claiming 11 percent of the market, while Samsung stepped into the top five for the first time at 11.7 million PCs and 9 percent share.

The upswings may have masked deeper problems. Apple and Samsung benefited from the iPad mini and Galaxy Tab lines, but they, Amazon and other tablet makers were reportedly propping up the market. Canalys doesn’t believe Windows 8 or RT moved the needle for demand, noting that laptop shipments were flat year-over-year where tablets surged 75 percent. It was a tough market for most conventional PC builders — just ask Dell — and there’s no immediate signs that it will be any easier for them in 2013.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.